To turf Boris Johnson out, Keir Starmer needs to rebrand his Labour Party
It must have hurt, not just being booed by those liberal lefty lawyers who turned up to celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, but being compared to Jeremy Corbyn – the very same man that Boris Johnson squashed into political oblivion in 2019. This is not the historical alignment with Winston Churchill he has worked all his life for. At this point, he might be hankering for a comparison with the monotony of John Major.
Of all of the mutiny on the backbenches, the letter from Jesse Norman was the most revealing: it was not just the parties, or the lies, or the dismissal of the public condemnation, it was the unsteady ship that sailed underneath the Prime Minister, unruddered by any real political ideology or Conservative heft.
“Under you, the government seems to lack a sense of mission,” wrote Norman, “it has a large majority but no long term plan.”
The Cabinet under Johnson has been fighting among itself for its Conservative heart because its leader has none; the only thing tying Michael Gove, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak together has been a thin ribbon of blue with the worn out letters of the party peeled off at the edges.
Despite this, Johnson has cleaved himself enough votes to survive; for now, many within the Tory Party will be rumbling.
What has always saved him, throughout his political career, is his inability to be consigned to the sidelines. Never has Johnson existed without the gravitas of celebrity behind him.
As he faced the music yesterday, the Labour Party was leaning over the rope of the fight, tongues wagging, minds dreaming. They could hardly believe their luck.
But there is a lesson in the Johnsonian legend for Keir Starmer. When Labour lost in 2019, the lawyer was brought in to calm the tumultuous currents pushing the party to and fro after the Corbyn era.
Labour is only eight points ahead according to YouGov; they are neck and neck with the Conservatives for trust in the economy, a prospect only the wildest dreamers of the party would have imagined on December 13, 2019 as many in the party nursed heavy heads on the morning after the election.
They should be further ahead. Can you imagine Tony Blair sitting on the opposite benches content with less than a 10 point lead as the governing party pulled itself apart at the seams?
Starmer is the political opposite of Johnson; where he has a steady voice, a cool head for logic and details, the Prime Minister is resplendent with pomp that has carried him all the way to No10 without ever really pinning himself to any tangible policy other than Brexit. Even that was done with a whimsical kind of “it’ll all be fine once we’re out” attitude that led to the current debacle over the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Yesterday Wes Streeting, a bastion of New Labour and the Shadow Health Secretary, said there are “no questions where Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is, Labour can be trusted with defence and security again, they can be trusted with the economy again”.
If only that were true.
If Johnson saw off the challenge, Streeting continued, Labour would see him off at the election.
Labour may be in a position they could have barely reached for in their imagination, but they are not in a position to see off the Conservative Party. Who would flock to Starmer in the streets? Who would bother to boo him, if they didn’t like him, in an east London restaurant, as the Prime Minister was over the weekend? Even yesterday, they were still very much lost amidst fights over the definition of a woman and whether or not they support crippling transport strikes.
Under Rachel Reeves’ economic rebrand they have made some headway on defining a fiscal policy for Labour, clawing back some respect from the business community. But it is not yet tied together with ideological consistency. Instead it is buoyed up by government failure; Conservative bungles can carry Labour forward, but it won’t win them an election.
They have had huge wins, forcing the government into a reverse-ferret on a windfall tax (sorry, a temporary, targeted energy profits levy), but you wouldn’t know if you asked someone outside of the SW1 sphere.
They too are ideologically at sea and Starmer lacks the star power of his opponent to carry this off.
This may be the beginning of the end of the road for Johnson, but that doesn’t mean it’s the beginning of a new road for New New Labour, unless they really search for it.